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Avoid Marketing Problems With Campaign Management Software

New terms and ways to target particular audiences arise on a daily basis. It’s not enough to launch and monitor full campaigns anymore—you need to monitor the marketing landscape too.

Your obligatory Mad Men image

It’s no wonder, then, that so many companies have marketing problems that interfere with launching and tracking their campaigns. Fortunately, campaign management software can help you avoid these common problems.

In this article, we’ll discuss the results from a survey we commissioned to find out what problems marketers typically face when managing their campaigns.

We’ll also look at how campaign management software can be used to address our respondents’ concerns, and explore how it might be valuable for your own small business.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Web-Based Campaigns Are the Most Popular

To find out more about the common challenges facing today’s marketers, we surveyed 125 of them and asked what kind of results they get from their campaigns.

While there was no dominant form of campaign, the three most popular types of campaigns—social media ads, internet ads and email blasts—are web-based, and nearly 70 percent of all campaigns produced are web-based.

What kind of marketing campaigns do you usually produce?

Once we had a view of the types of campaigns that marketers are running, we wanted to know if they were generally satisfied with the impact that those campaigns have on their business.

Every respondent we surveyed indicated that they were at least minimally satisfied with the impact, but that still leaves room for improvement, with 63 percent saying that they were “moderately satisfied” and 30 percent saying they were “very satisfied.”

How satisfied are you with your marketing campaigns’ impact on your business?

It turns out that less than a third of marketers are “very satisfied” with the results of their campaigns. That leaves 70 percent of marketers who could see improvement in their level of satisfaction.

The distinction here is obviously somewhat subjective. Think of “minimally satisfying” as a campaign that makes its money back, “moderately satisfying” as one that makes a profit, and “very satisfying” as one that makes a profit and pulls in new loyal customers.

Thus, although about a third of marketers seem quite content with the results of their marketing campaigns, that leaves 70 percent of marketers who could see improvement in their level of satisfaction.

The Biggest Challenge Is Generating Traffic and Leads

One way marketers can increase satisfaction is by addressing the biggest challenges and problems facing their campaigns, which is why we next asked our respondents to tell us what those challenges were.

What is your biggest challenge when managing a marketing campaign?

The biggest problem for these marketers, at 41 percent (more than triple the next largest problem), is generating traffic and leads.

This is understandable; successful marketing relies upon an audience actually seeing the marketing campaign, which can only come from those much-desired leads and the traffic they generate.

With the right software, though, this challenge becomes much more surmountable!

How can software help?

Campaign management software can provide you with a deep-dive into your current and previous campaigns in order to discover what does and does not work to create traffic from your target audience.

Campaign optimization tools will allow you to test and evaluate your marketing campaign materials and goals (such as ads, keywords and targeting choices) so that you can fine tune them. This way, you can get your message in front of the most people’s eyes and learn more about what messages speak to your particular audience.

Data and Analytics Can Be Hard to Find

The second biggest challenge for marketers, after generating traffic and leads, is finding data and analytics. This proved to be the case when we asked our respondents what their biggest campaign management challenge was (see the chart above) as well as when we asked them to pick their top recurring campaign management problems.

What are your top recurring challenges when managing a marketing campaign?

This problem also came up when we asked respondents to describe any other recurring challenges they face when managing marketing campaigns. Responses included difficulties figuring out “how to analyze data from previous campaigns” and having “too much data to go through.”

Thus, for our marketers, it wasn’t just finding the data that was a problem, it was interpreting it once they had it in their hands.

Fortunately, this is another area in which campaign management software excels.

How can software help?

One of the primary functions of campaign management software is to provide data mining tools that will allow you to take a deep dive into your previous campaigns.

These tools will take that large body of data and analyze it for you so that you can predict customer and prospect behavior, as well as assign scores to your contacts to help you better understand the likelihood of different people responding to different types of campaigns.

Furthermore, customer segmentation tools will collect and analyze data from those customers and contacts in order to divide your consumer base into relevant target groups for whom you can optimize specific content.

Marketers Need to Track the Impact and ROI of Campaigns

Another large problem faced by the marketers we surveyed is the ability to trace the impact of their campaigns, which would let them know their return on investment (ROI) for those campaigns.

This is more than an academic exercise for marketers; ROI is frequently tied to their operating budgets. As one respondent noted, “Being able to understand the effectiveness of our campaigns has been the most recurring challenge. I personally have to justify our budget with ROI and that is quite difficult, to say the least.”

Tracing ROI can be a difficult task. We asked our respondents to estimate the percentage of their ROI for a variety of different types of marketing campaigns, and received a breakdown of answers that indicated how ROI can vary significantly both within and between different campaign types.

ROI of Email Blasts

ROI of Drip Emails

ROI of Social Media Ads/Marketing

ROI of Print Ads/Marketing

ROI of Internet Ads/Marketing

ROI of TV/Radio Ads/Marketing

ROI of Phone Marketing

ROI of Text Message Marketing

ROI of Inbound Marketing

ROI of Content Marketing

None of the campaign types we asked about received high ROI across the board, and a significant number of respondents had no experience with many of the campaign types.

Though it’s hard to draw generalized conclusions,the key takeaway is that it is vitally important for marketers to know what kind of ROI they are receiving from each type of campaign they’re managing.

How can software help?

The same data mining tools that can be used to analyze your current and previous campaigns can help you clearly and specifically see what your ROI is for each campaign type you launch.

With this information in hand, you can use the campaign optimization tools to further fine-tune both your content and the targeting of that content so that you are not just optimizing your campaign materials, but also their ultimate ROI.

Conclusions and Next Steps

A lot of marketing problems can come to the fore when attempting to manage multiple campaigns across a variety of channels. As our survey results show, these problems come in a variety of forms, and require a variety of solutions.

Software can be of use here by automating certain tasks and taking some of the burden off of an already-overworked marketing team.

Campaign management software, in particular, can help marketers make sure their campaigns run smoothly and optimally, with the highest possible ROI, thanks to the following features that we’ve discussed above:

Data mining: Analyze large amounts of information in order to predict customer and prospect behavior. Statistical models that predict certain customer activities can be run against a contact database to assign scores indicating the likelihood of a specific actions taken by those contacts, which will help you with customer segmentation.

Customer segmentation: Collect and analyze data from your customers in order to divide your consumer base into different relevant groups by age, income, interests, spending habits etc. This allows you to market specific messages, on specific media, to individually tailored audiences.

Campaign optimization: Constantly test and evaluate your marketing campaign materials and goals—including ads, keywords and targeting choices—and fine tune them so that you are receiving an optimized return on your investment.

Now that you know just how helpful the software can be for you, here are some next steps to consider:

Email me at andrewfriedenthal@softwareadvice.com for more information. I’m happy to help you figure out what your own campaign management software needs might be and to connect you to one of our expert software advisors for a free, no-obligation consultation!